Students step up

Saturday

Feb 16, 2019 at 3:01 AM

Print is dead.

So-called experts in the field of media communications have been sounding this alarm now for about three decades, and in truth there is something to their claims. Newspapers across the country continue to close in record numbers, and those that manage to survive often only do so with severely diminished staff numbers, leaving fewer people throughout the organization to get the hard work of good reporting done properly.

But although the future for print may be bleak, the future of journalism remains bright due in no small part to a dedicated corps of young reporters and editors who are proving that they remain dedicated to the bedrock principles of the giants - think Nellie Bly and Edward R. Murrow, among many others - on whose shoulders they stand.

In truth, student journalists have long been on the front lines of preserving press freedoms. According to the Student Press Law Center, high school and college newspapers across the country routinely face efforts by school administrators to limit or censor their speech. In some cases, the effort comes in the form of a tacit reminder that the school controls the purse strings, and that such funding could easily disappear.

In other cases, administrators take a decidedly more aggressive approach, as in the case of an Arkansas high school newspaper. The staff of the Har-ber Herald, the school paper at Springdale’s Har-ber High School, last year ran afoul of its administration when they reported on the transfer of a handful of high school football players to a neighboring school, where they were allowed to play, allegedly in violation of the district’s own rules. The district instructed the paper’s adviser to remove the article from the paper’s website, and then suspended publication of the paper. The move prompted well-deserved outrage, and the paper was eventually reinstated.

Less than two years ago, the staff of The Redux, a high school paper at Pittsburg High School, faced a similar situation when during a routine story about the hiring of a new principal, student reporters discovered discrepancies in what the candidate had presented during the hiring process and what they could confirm independently. After confronting the principal with the information and then presenting the information to the district’s superintendent, the principal resigned.

And lest anyone think that high school reporters do not face the challenges of war zone correspondents, consider this: During last year’s attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, even as they were literally struggling to stay alive, student journalists from the school’s paper, The Eagle Eye, were recording the events and broadcasting them out in real time. Days later, they were producing stories about the attack, and preparing to cover the March for Our Lives, a nationwide anti-gun violence event spearheaded by their classmates.

The Student Press Law Center, the Newseum, and the Freedom Forum Institute recently decided to honor such courage by declaring 2019 the Year of the Student Journalist. The groups hope to raise awareness of the vital role that student journalists play in covering events of their schools and communities while also shining a spotlight on the challenges they face, in the form of censoring and prior review of their work. Finally, the groups hope to focus attention on the importance of journalism education as it relates to being part of a society.

Fortunately, high school and college journalists in Massachusetts are protected by one of the strongest freedom of the press state laws in the country, but as we know, the rights of journalists everywhere remain under constant attack at the highest levels of government. It is incumbent upon all of us to support this next generation of journalists so that they can continue to bring all of us the unbiased, unvarnished facts that allow us to make informed decisions. So, even if print is dying, the next generation of reporters will be ready to share the truth in whatever medium comes next.

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